Depression, schizophrenia, autism and other psychiatric disorders show common genetic link

a post by Derek Beres for the Big Think blog

In his book The Gene, journalist and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee borrows Richard Dawkins’s description of genes not as ‘blueprints’ but ‘recipes’ that specify processes inside of our bodies, calling them ‘formula for forms’. Our understanding of disease must now consider the most elementary of molecules, he continues. In order to wrap our heads around the nature of disease, scientists “must break the world into its constituent parts – genes, atoms, bytes – before making it whole again”.

One of our great strengths as humans is our ability to recognize patterns, to break down the whole into its parts to better understand how it became whole in the first place. In medicine, this has led to errant diagnoses like when the Greek physician Hippocrates identified the four humors – the notion that all disease stems from one of four bodily fluids (though in fairness, autopsies were taboo when the Greek physician lived). While some patterns are highly speculative, we’re getting better at recognizing ones that matter.

Continue reading but please remember that this is research. It could help in the development of potential treatments.

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